Water, Part 3: Rain, Rain, Stay Right Here

Today's a very rainy day on the farm and it has me thinking a lot about water again. I wrote some posts on my previous blog about water so I thought I'd re-post them here and continue with the theme.

Original post: 12/22/2010

The rainy season has officially arrived and I of course waited until the last minute to put some things together that I was planning to get to all summer. But I finally completed the projects and can now add another part to the series. This part on water has to do with rainwater harvesting. I think I initially heard of rainwater harvesting in my first green building course and it immediately intrigued me but it's taken five years to do anything with it.

October of last year my father and I went out to Benicia to pick up a couple of used food barrels, which I intended to convert to rain barrels. This year I built a platform with room for three so I need to go back for another. With some parts from The Urban Farmer Store in Richmond I added valves and tubing connecting the two together and then cut off one of our downspouts and added a diverter with a built-in first flush system. With a few pieces of PVC I connected the supply pipe and I was ready to harvest some rainwater.

You can see the diverter at the cut downspout. The first flush continues down and then turns 90 degrees to daylight a ways from the house. The barrel overflow also connects into this pipe with a T fitting.

We've had a few good storms and the barrels are already filled, probably about 100 gallons. But now what do I do with the water? It's still the rainy season and will be for awhile so I don't need the water for anything outside. And herein lies the problem with harvesting rainwater in this area. When you need the water is during the dry season, but 100 gallons won't last very long during that time. So storage becomes the key element and one hundred gallons just won't cut it. We're talking about needing storage for hundreds of gallons if you were going to keep it to outside use; and if we start considering indoor use as a possibility, it gets into thousands of gallons. Indoor use isn't on the near horizon since that would involve some complex plumbing but I would like to have more storage for outside use so it's either a lot more barrels or look into some large storage tanks. I've seen some cube shaped containers used for cooking oil that hold a few hundred gallons and have a metal cage on the outside making them stackable so maybe a few of those along the side of the house.

Right now this is all a bit experimental for me but there is a potential for serious harvesting and if you can manage the storage, you could theoretically get off the water grid. At the moment the only legal indoor use for harvested rainwater is for toilets and possibly laundry. But with a metal or clay tile roof, the harvested rainwater would be safe enough to drink and could then be used for showers, sinks, dishes, etc. I don't know if I'd ever go that far but I like the idea of it.

Water, Part 2: Out Damn Water! Out!

Original post: 11/11/2010

This is the second part in a series that I hope to write about water. Earlier this year was Part 1 about supply. Not too long after that we had to deal with the other direction, water leaving the house. When running the kitchen sink faucet we started to hear a the sound of water leaking somewhere. Luckily we still had a home warranty insurance that the selling agent had given us. They sent out a plumber who found the culprit, more galvanized pipe.

I can't believe that pipe actually took that long to leak. The rusted holes must have been so clogged with junk that the water just ran right over it. The plumber replaced it with a new section of black PVC pipe and tested it with the sink faucet running. No problems.

Then a few weeks later I was crawling around in the crawl space (it's my man cave) and noticed that the cripple wall framing in that same area was very wet. As it turned out, when the plumber cut out the old pipe he must have weakened another joint that only released water when we used the upstairs bathroom. So three weeks of showers and sink use had contributed to more leaking. I called up the insurance again and got the same guy out. He replaced more sections and now we have a leak-free pipe junction.

That still leaves sections of pipe that are bound to give out in the future, like the shower drain pipe. It makes me wish we had replaced it when we had the kitchen ceiling open for the supply piping. Here's hoping it holds out for a good long while.

Water, Part 1 Revisited

Original post: 5/31/2010

A few months ago I posted about having the plumbing replaced in the entire house in Water, Part 1. What they didn't replace was the section of pipe from the water meter to the house. I think they asked if I wanted that replaced and I said no to save some money. Well, last weekend it came back to haunt me. I was breaking up some concrete in the front yard and one piece wasn't coming up very easily so I yanked harder and up it came along with a copper pipe, which turned out to be the incoming line to the house.

My first inclination was to bend it back straight but I stopped myself in case it broke and I had a gusher on my hands that would have been an even worse problem. So I let it be and spent the next couple hours digging a trench from the house to the sidewalk since I figured the whole thing would need to be replaced.

I couldn't believe how close the original pipe was to the surface. I had even seen a section sticking out of the ground before but I never thought it was actually part of a pipe being used. That was a Sunday afternoon and I wasn't about to start a project that I might not finish and then be stuck without water for who knows how long. So I left the trench for a week and was able to return to it on Saturday. In the morning I got the parts at Home Depot, shut off the water, and jumped right in by cutting out the old pipe. At that point I realized I was committed and could only hope things went smoothly. But of course they didn't. The old pipe was a little soft and it was difficult to get a clean cut that I could couple to . Then when I did get a decent cut, the water was still coming out slowly and I wasn't able to heat the pipe enough to get the solder to melt. I thought I was stuck and was sure I wouldn't be able to solve it so started to track down a plumber. I called one I know to see if one of his guys could come out but nobody was available and it being a holiday weekend I had visions of being waterless until Tuesday. I thought about it for awhile and then called the same plumber back and asked if he knew what to do. He said to disconnect the pipe at the meter and the water would stop flowing. Sure enough, as soon as I disconnected it the water stopped coming out from where I was trying to attach the coupling and I was able to solder the coupling. All the other connections went smoothly and soon I had it all connected. Next came the moment of truth and I turned the water back on. No leaks! I was a little surprised and very relieved that it worked.

I filled in the trench with drain rock and then soil and now it's back to normal. I'm a little glad that nobody was available and I had to work it out on my own. It gave a nice sense of satisfaction to have a project like that turn out well.

Water, Part 1: This Old Plumbing

Original post: 2/23/2010

Since we bought our house last year, water has seemed to be a recurring theme . Water coming in; water going out; water from the sky; and water from the earth. First we'll start with water coming in, i.e. supply. Our house, like many old houses, had galvanized steel pipes for the water coming in and going to sinks, tubs, toilets, etc. It probably sounded like a good idea at the time and it sure beats lead piping, but the life span of galvanized steel pipes is about forty or fifty years. The problem is that minerals and rust start to build up and near the end you'll have a 3/4" pipe with a 1/4" hole. This really affects water pressure and while our shower was tolerable, we barely got any hot water pressure in our kitchen sink. Which brings me to Exhibit 1:

Exhibit 1. This is not good. This was the pipe that went from our water heater, across the house to the chimney shaft, up to the floor framing, back to the exterior wall, and then back down to the kitchen sink on the same side as the water heater. A fifteen foot straight distance made with probably 100 feet of pipe. This piece was in the crawl space and as you can see was completely rusted through...and wet. This might have lasted another ten years or it could have burst at any moment, which could be quite inconvenient if we were out of town and the water ran for a few days at full pressure flooding our crawl space and running up an exorbitant water bill. So I replaced this section of pipe, which brings me to Exhibit 2:

Once we removed that section of pipe, I was able to break it in two just with my hands. We replaced it with a section of copper pipe and I thought that would fix the pressure problem but no. It was just the same, which meant there was another spot with a lot of corrosion or maybe it was all blocked. So we decided to have the house re-piped, and quite a difference that made. A team of guys arrived and in one day they replaced all that old pipe with brand new copper pipes, which should last as long as the house does.

The finished product. You can see the old galvanized pipes (the smaller diameter ones) that were left in place.